A nominally Christian community

In order to understand how the leaders of a nominally Christian community could inaugurate and carry on a systematic, high-handed persecution against their former brethren, under the government of a Mohammedan power, and inflict upon them actual punishment, it will be necessary to refer again, and more minutely, to the peculiar constitution of things under which the various nations were living in Turkey. This system of government was established when the Ottoman Turks took Constantinople. It seems to have been adopted to relieve the Sultan and his ministers of the trouble of looking after the various classes of people that were under the control of the Porte. It is a marvel that it worked even as miserably well as it did; but it opened the door for a vast amount of oppression and misrule.

The Turkish government, of which the Sultan was the despotic head, was supreme; but only the Turks and other Mohammedans were directly amenable to its authority. All other nations, such as the Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, had each its own head and its own government, which was literally an imperium in imperia. By the fundamental law of the empire, each nation was a distinct community, and attended to its own affairs very much as if there were no other government existing in Turkey. The Armenians, for instance, had their patriarch, appointed by the Sultan and ranking with the higher Turkish pashas, who was held responsible for the government and the good conduct of that nation, and who was invested for this purpose with almost unlimited authority over his people.

Really subject to the Sultan

Though nominally and really subject to the Sultan, his acts were seldom interfered with, however arbitrary or oppressive they might be, so long as they did not affect the Mohammedans. He was both civil and ecclesiastical head of his nation, and had authority to inflict both civil and ecclesiastical penalties. One form of punishment, dreaded almost as much as death, that of banishment to distant parts of the empire, he could not inflict; but an order of banishment was easily obtained from the Sultan, especially if the application for it were accompanied with a suitable bribe.